Yantas - A Pretty Amateur WIP

[Jalyha]

Okay so I've missed a lot! Also some of your recent noticings shows me that I've made several mistakes on my own african-ish world.

But I wanted to chime in and say it looks like you've done massive amounts of work while I was away and it looks like it's progressing wonderfully!!!


xoxoxo

[sangi39]

So it's been, wow, uh, 23 days since I last posted here. I've managed to literally do no work on either this world or any of my conlangs for over three weeks, which is kind of shocking. What the frell have I been doing all this time? 2048 has taken up some of my time, so's watching The Guild and rewatching old TV programmes. Man, I suck Anyway, back to stuff.

Okay so I've missed a lot! Also some of your recent noticings shows me that I've made several mistakes on my own african-ish world.

Is that Ibala you're talking about?

But I wanted to chime in and say it looks like you've done massive amounts of work while I was away and it looks like it's progressing wonderfully!!!

Thanks I'm hoping once I get back into the swing of things with this world, I can actually move forward a bit more.

Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be all that many people online who are able to help with Koppen climate maps. I posted the latest version here, as well as on both the ZBB and the CBB and got a total of 3 replies dealing specifically with inaccuracies (1 here, two on the ZBB, and none on the CBB), with the two main criticisms being the size of my deserts ("too large") and the fact that many of my climate zones stick to latitude too much (which, interestingly enough, I pointed out when posting it, lol) and a minor criticism being that I didn't include all of the different Koppen climate zones (this is where the Climate Cookbook starts to fail anyway, conflating several climate zones into one). One user also pointed out that my coastal climates would likely stretch inland more than I have them at the moment.

I guess that's one of the reasons I've been able to move on. While "your deserts are too large" is all well and good, it's not really constructive, a kind of criticism which only one user of the three, acrsome, provided

However, following acrsome's advice, I went and looked at the Koppen climate map for Earth and mine does have some problems:

1) Tropical Rainforest, Af: On Earth, these seem to be blobs on or near the equator, surrounded by Am or Aw zones (northern South America and Central Africa), taking up the entirety of this latitude only on smaller islands (Sumatra, Java and New Guinea being fairly large examples).

2) I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the south of Mistaya might be Am/Aw rather than BSh.

3) The desert of northern Mistaya probably would be a bit smaller while the steppe on the eastern side of the mountains might be taken over a little bit more by the Aw and Cfa climates, bringing the latter more inland. The deserts in Sirden and on the island south of Hungas might also be a bit smaller, but I think the desert in Arenda would probably remain the size it is now.

4) I think the Mediterranean climate of western Sirden might stretch a little further south, while simultaneously going a little further inland along with the Cfb zone to the south.

5) The eastern island of Velkasta probably needs sorting out. I'm not sure that the Cfb zone on its western coast would necessarily be there, given the lack of open water to the west. I get the feeling the entire northern part of the eastern island might be something like Dwc, but whether that makes sense, I don't know.

That's all I can think of right now, other than looking more and more at Earth's climate zones and finding analogues or near analogues to areas on Yantas (Earth doesnt have many long north-to-south mountain ranges on the east coats of continent so that poses at least one problem).

I might take a break from climates for a moment, hard to get my head round them, and come up with some names for major geographical features. "The island south of Hungas" and "the mountains in north-western Arenda" are a bit of a mouthful

[acrosome]

Y'know, I see what you mean by the size of the deserts. When you look at the Earth's Koppen map the only truly immense desert is the Sahara/Middle East. At a guess, it's large because:

1. The latitude is perfect, with a cold west-coast current that limits evaporation.
2. North Africa is a large and (mostly) unbroken land mass, creating rainshadow-like effects.
3. There are no high mountain ranges to act as climatologic speed-bumps, until you hit the Himalayas

Western Australia is another larger example (also no mountains 'till the east coast) but the rest tend to be small in extent. I suspect that this is because they are on land masses that aren't very large east-west, so sea effects mitigate. And in western North America the desert latitudes are smack in the middle of a west-coast mountain range, to boot. (That desert in northwest Sirden might be a good analogue of that- all broken up with mountains- though I'm not sure what effect that warm east-coast current will have.) Even southern Africa is basically one large highland plateau.

My mind boggles at trying to wrap itself around all of this. I've had best luck just looking for Earth analogues to terrain/latitudes/altitudes on my fantasy map, and trying to make them look similar. But it looks like I might have to go tone down my deserts, too, now.

So, I'll throw up my hands, and go babble in the corner for a bit...

EDIT- Out of curiosity, what is "CBB" and "ZBB"?

[Pixie]

I came across this map the other day and saved it for my own reference...
Mapas bioclimáticos y biogeográficos

I thought I should share. It goes to show two things in comparison with Yantas climate map:
- there are no straight lines and yet climates follow latitude quite closely
- water bodies can have a very limited influence, only a few kilometers inland

Also, the map just looks great for any map-lover-kind-of-person, so that makes it worth sharing on its own.

[sangi39]

Y'know, I see what you mean by the size of the deserts. When you look at the Earth's Koppen map the only truly immense desert is the Sahara/Middle East. At a guess, it's large because:

1. The latitude is perfect, with a cold west-coast current that limits evaporation.
2. North Africa is a large and (mostly) unbroken land mass, creating rainshadow-like effects.
3. There are no high mountain ranges to act as climatologic speed-bumps, until you hit the Himalayas

Western Australia is another larger example (also no mountains 'till the east coast) but the rest tend to be small in extent. I suspect that this is because they are on land masses that aren't very large east-west, so sea effects mitigate. And in western North America the desert latitudes are smack in the middle of a west-coast mountain range, to boot. (That desert in northwest Sirden might be a good analogue of that- all broken up with mountains- though I'm not sure what effect that warm east-coast current will have.) Even southern Africa is basically one large highland plateau.

My mind boggles at trying to wrap itself around all of this. I've had best luck just looking for Earth analogues to terrain/latitudes/altitudes on my fantasy map, and trying to make them look similar. But it looks like I might have to go tone down my deserts, too, now.

So, I'll throw up my hands, and go babble in the corner for a bit...

I might have to join you in the babbling.

On a similar note, another user on the ZBB recently posted a climate map of his conworld and received a sum total zero replies

EDIT- Out of curiosity, what is "CBB" and "ZBB"?

Conlang Bulletin Board
Zompist Bulletin Board

Two forums devoted predominantly to conlangs, with some focus on conworld

[sangi39]

I came across this map the other day and saved it for my own reference...
Mapas bioclimáticos y biogeográficos

I thought I should share. It goes to show two things in comparison with Yantas climate map:
- there are no straight lines and yet climates follow latitude quite closely
- water bodies can have a very limited influence, only a few kilometers inland

Also, the map just looks great for any map-lover-kind-of-person, so that makes it worth sharing on its own.

Very interesting indeed

[acrosome]

One thing that I think you have to do before fleshing out climate is to work out your rough topography first. Basically, you need to figure out how high those various mountain ranges are. In particular, the mountain ranges in Mistaya and the southeastern coast of Arenda look like they have the potential to be huge, being as they are the products of the vigorous collision of plates that are each moving toward one another. So you're going to have the same problem that I do- how to deal with Himalayas that sit smack on the equator...

For another instance, on the Earth's Koppen map all that the Appalachians accomplish is to draw some relatively mild northern climates a bit further south. At higher latitudes, in Siberia the Urals and other ranges clearly cause strips of colder climates along them, not unlike the Appalachians.

But the Himalayas are so high that they have tundra over most of them, crate a massive cold-desert rainshadow, stop the massive Sahara/Middle-east desert from progressing eastwards, and clearly drive high-elevation temperate climates west/east/south of them.

The Andes are tall but very thin, rising with a great relief almost from sea level, so they act like an impenetrable wall blocking west-coast climates from extending from more than a strip on the west coast of South America.

Finally, some isolated high-elevation zones do weird things- like Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya in Africa which seem to create mediterranean or temperate climates in the middle of otherwise tropical climates.

I also think that you can give your world a bit more character by adding in some random lower mountain ranges like the Appalachians and the Urals. These aren't readily explained by the plate tectonics as you show on the first page of this thread, because they are older remnants of historical processes that aren't vey active any more. The Appalachians are remnants of plate collisions during the formation of Pangaea about half a billion years ago, in the Ordovician! Jawed fish hadn't even appeared yet! Technically the Appalachians extend into Europe and even North Africa (as the Lesser Atlas Range), for that matter- look at your Panaea map on the first page and you'll see how that can be. Or google the International Appalachian Trail, or the Wikipedia Page about it. This intercontinental meta-Appalachian range is supposedly the remnants of the Central Pangaean Mountains.

A fun intellectual exercise might be to fit your modern continents into a pseudo-Pangaea and see where the remnants of similar ancient mountains might be...

[sangi39]

I had actually attempted to come up with some rough advances in the mountain ranges in an incomplete altitude map ]back on page 3. I've added a few more lower-altitude mountain ranges (2000-ish metres) in north-western Arenda and north-western and north-eastern Hungas, alongside the already decided Ural-esque mountain ranges in southern Sirden, which you can see in the climate map attempts. The other mountain ranges are the result of current tectonic activity which I think this map best represents:

[sangi39]

I really should get back to working on this, since it's been almost a year since I've done anything with it, of various reasons. About 2 weeks after I made my last post, my (now ex) wife and I split up, and about a month after that I moved back in with my mum and my brother, so those two months saw this project take a major hit in terms of how much time I dedicated to it. After that, I just never really picked it back up, and real-life just kept getting in the way (for about 2 months towards the end of the year, I spent most of my free time, which wasn't much do to increased hours at work in the run-up to Christmas, either hanging out with my ex where we used to live together or spending time with a woman I kind of started seeing in November).

It's been a pretty weird year, but I think I feel like I can start giving a portion of my time back to Yantas.

[sangi39]

So it's been a few years and I've not exactly made a huge amount of progress (damn real life)... This is still all I have so far:



There's a really broad colour key of light brown-green for areas above 500m, dark brown-green for above 1000, black for over 2000m, and brown for plateaus and very light brown for basins.

The continents and oceans are named, as are the larger islands, but I'd need to get to my laptop for that.